Jabbo Smith

Cladys "Jabbo" Smith (born December 24, 1908 in Pembroke , Georgia , † January 16, 1991 in New York City ) was an American jazz trumpeter .

Life

Jabbo Smith's father died in 1912. When he was six years old, his mother placed him in an orphanage in Charleston, South Carolina , where he learned to play the trumpet and trombone. At the age of ten he toured the country with the home's school band, the Jenkins Orphanage Band . At 16 he left the institution to become a professional musician. He first played with bands in Philadelphia and Atlantic City (New Jersey) before moving to Manhattan in 1925 . The first recordings were made in 1928. In the same year he played in the band of pianist James P. Johnson . Johnson's band broke up that same year in Chicago , where Smith stayed for the next few years. It was here in 1929 that the Brunswick Records label and his own formation, Jabbo Smith's Rhythm Aces, recorded the recordings that have established his fame in jazz circles to this day. a. Banjo player Ikey Robinson also took part. He also worked on recordings of Charlie Johnson and the Duke Ellington Band (1927).

In the 1930s he moved to Milwaukee and only appeared occasionally as a musician (including Claude Hopkins ). He made his living working for a car rental company. At the end of the 1960s he made a comeback, during which tours - in addition to regular appearances in New York shows such as the musical One Mo 'Time  - took him to Great Britain and France until the 1980s.

meaning

Jabbo Smith, though largely forgotten today, was very successful in the late 1920s and known as Louis Armstrong's most serious rival . In fact, Smith's recordings are in no way inferior to Armstrong's pieces that were created at the same time in terms of technique and imaginative play. His influence on the way young Roy Eldridge played is also significant . There are several factors that explain why Smith's career was so modest, given his outstanding talent. On the one hand, alcohol and overconfidence played a big role in adolescence (at the age of 20 he was one of the top earners among jazz musicians in New York and Chicago). When Duke Ellington offered to join his band, he laughed in the face because Ellington offered him "only" 90 dollars a week instead of the 150 that Smith was earning at the time (90 dollars were an absolute top wage for a jazz musician around 1928) . On the other hand, it was precisely his fluid style, which was modern for the time, which was not well received by the audience (the “Rhythm Aces” recordings from 1929, which are now considered classic, sold poorly). Audiences began to lean towards a softer, sweeter style around the Depression Era, and Smith - unlike Louis Armstrong - did not conform to that. He also spent many years away from the musical jazz hotspots of his time, New York and Chicago, and preferred to find his way to places like Newark and Milwaukee for personal reasons.

Lexigraphic entries

• Ian Carr , Digby Fairweather , Brian Priestley : Rough Guide Jazz. The ultimate guide to jazz music. 1700 artists and bands from the beginning until today. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 1999, ISBN 3-476-01584-X .
• Leonard Feather , Ira Gitler : The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz. Oxford University Press, New York 1999, ISBN 0-19-532000-X .

Web links

• Jabbo Smith in the Red Hot Jazz Archive - with audio files of his most important recordings.
• Jabbo Smith at Allmusic (English)
• Jabbo Smith at Discogs (English)